IRIS Movie of the Day
At least once a week a movie of the Sun taken by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) is posted by one of the scientists operating the instrument.
A Long Look at AR13068
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Lucas Guliano
Over the last two weeks, IRIS had a consistent target on the Sun: Active Region 13068. Due to its configuration/stability and the lack of other interesting regions, AR13068 was the default target from July 30th until it rotated behind the limb early on August 9th. I observed this target for about 80% of its journey from east limb to west limb with a heavy emphasis on high-cadence observations. During this time, IRIS took approximately 55 hours worth of high-cadence data from AR13068 totaling over 100,000 individual images. This doesn't even include the 11 other datasets utilizing different observation programs that contribute an additional 33 hours worth of data and close to 15,000 more images of AR13068! The video here only shows our high cadence data and was significantly sped up so that it could be uploaded. (Plus, nobody wants to sit through that much data at regular speed!) But even at accelerated rates we can see the evolution of this region throughout its lifetime. The region was large enough and our FOV on high-cadence observations is small enough that some of these datasets take place at different locations over the region; hence the large jumps in appearance over small timeframes. By combining over 10GBs of data from these high-cadence observations into a single movie, we have created one of the most comprehensive examinations of an active region ever compiled with a runtime of an impressive 65 continuous minutes at original speed; long enough to be considered a 'feature length' documentary. Sometimes, it takes this level of dedication to a region in order to capture the best dataset (see last week's MOD) that makes the whole process worth it. If this region endures its journey across the backside of the Sun and comes back around, it will receive a new AR designation and may be unrecognizable. But after this much time together, I consider AR13068 a dear friend of mine and look forward to its hopeful return in a few weeks.